Volume 55, Number 17 · November 6, 2008
The Deceptive Director
By Nathaniel Rich
Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King
by Foster Hirsch
Knopf, 573 pp., $35.00
The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger
by Chris Fujiwara
Faber and Faber, 479 pp., $35.00
Preminger: An Autobiography
by Otto Preminger
Doubleday, 208 pp. (1977)
During the filming of Forever Amber (1947), Otto Preminger yelled at Linda Darnell almost daily for two months, until the actress collapsed on the set and was ordered by a doctor to take ten days off to convalesce. In rehearsals for his production of Herman Wouk's A Modern Primitive—a play that never made it to Broadway—Preminger screamed so violently at an actor who struggled to remember his lines that the man suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken away to spend the next four months in a sanitarium. 'I had never seen such terrifying rage in anyone,' said one witness, who described the director with 'veins standing out on his forehead' and 'literally foaming at the mouth.' On the set of the comedy The Moon Is Blue (1953), Maggie McNamara, 'a jittery newcomer with a fragile ego,' was the victim of Preminger's tantrums. 'McNamara was to commit suicide in 1978,' Preminger's biographer Foster Hirsch ominously remarks. The list of jittery actresses with fragile egos reduced by Preminger to tears also includes Marilyn Monroe, Jean Seberg, and Dorothy Dandridge—all suicides as well, it is perhaps unfair to note.
Review, 3852 words
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